Workshop Recap: Details add energy to your stories

Recognize where your story has energy, John Lofflin said. Then think about moving that part of the story closer to the top, he added.

A journalism professor at Park University in Parkville, Mo., Lofflin also serves as special assignment editor for Veterinary Economics, an Advanstar Veterinary Healthcare Communications publication based in n Lenexa, Kan. He gave the presentation “The Art of Storytelling: How to Make a Boring Story Interesting” at the Spring Writing and Editing Workshop on May 15 in Overland Park, Kan. The Kansas City chapter of the American Society of Business Publication Editors organized the event held at the Brookridge Country Club.

Lofflin said he finds it difficult to explain his energy theory to students. The energy happens when a writer, at one point in the story, recognizes he or she has nailed it and becomes inspired. The writing happens at a quicker pace.

Sometimes a direct quote sparks the energy. Details give a story energy, too.

“Detail is a thing you have to learn to see,” he said.

Details can give a reader a sense of being at the event, or peering over the reporter’s shoulder during an interview. Details can cause a reader to interact with the story on a sensual level.

Even if reporters are unable to attend an event in person, they can use other tactics to obtain detail. Lofflin said he uses Google Earth on his computer to learn about places. Using this strategy once, he said he felt confident calling a Colorado town a two-story town.

He gave another example of calling back a veterinarian while writing a story about animal abuse. He wanted to know the weight of a cat that had died. It led to this sentence: “Excuse Dr. Brett Levitsky if his blood still runs hot when he’s asked to remember that April day in 2004 when 9-pound Darwin was laid on his exam table DOA.”

Workshop Recap: Keep clutter out of your stories

This lead just won’t do: Ron Johnson talked about copy editing Tuesday afternoon.

Ron Johnson even said it won’t do, and he has taught editing and design classes at Kansas State University since 1989. Johnson gave the presentation “Big Picture Editing Techniques: The Nuts and Bolts of Weaving a Story Together” at the Spring Writing and Editing Workshop on May 15 in Overland Park, Kan. The Kansas City chapter of the American Society of Business Publication Editors organized the event held at the Brookridge Country Club.

Besides weak leads, Johnson gave suggestions on making transitions brief, providing just enough background information and avoiding paragraphs that say the same thing as the quotes that follow.

“Don’t make people hack through your verbiage to get to your cool stuff,” he said.

Johnson said writers may decide on a news lead and use the “who, what, when, where and how” of a story. However, he added, you do not need all five of those elements in the lead. You can select the most important ones for the first paragraph and add the other ones later.

Narrative leads, he said, can allow a writer to use one person’s perspective to illustrate the story’s big picture. Narrative leads tend to work better in longer stories, he said.

Stories in trade publications generally need adequate background information early on in the story, he said. Writers should try to summarize the information in a sentence or two.

Diversify sentence lengths and paragraph lengths throughout the story, he said. While reporting, writers should shop for a lead quote and a concluding quote. The lead quote can go high up in the story, like in the second or third paragraph.

And to finish? Johnson said, “The direct quote is about always the best way to end a story.”